Introduction

This page is a repository for links, text and concepts useful in the practice of System Safety Engineering.

Background

All technology comes with risk. The only way to build a completely safe system is not to build it. The goal of System Safety is accurate risk estimation to support informed decision making.

As pointed out by Kevin Kelly in “What Technology Wants”, the development of life on Earth started with self-reproducing molecules, continued with more complex forms - biology - eventually stumbling on intelligence.

The division between “humanity” and “technology” is not as clear as it might first seem. “Human” is sometimes defined by tool use or the application of intelligence to problem solving. Humans shape their environment, starting with stone tools and agriculture and continuing with mining, organized production, global operations etc. etc. But technology also shapes humans and their societies - better tools mean more opportunity, a wider theater of development, more wealth, more freedom from risk.

Engineering, loosely defined, has been around as long as technology has. Early humans who invented better tools, improved their living quarters, and generally sought a better bargain with the environment were engineering. The modern definition and practice of engineering, applying the scientific method to not only building, but analyzing problems and predicting the effectiveness of un-built solutions, has developed alongside modern technology.

System Safety, a sub-discipline of Systems Engineering has a history only a few decades long. System Safety is one method of communication between the Engineering process working on a system and the Decision-Making process which must decide if the Risks involved in the system are acceptable. Decision makers inform the engineers on the level of Risk which will be acceptable for a project, and the engineers estimate the Risk inherent in the current design so that the decision makers can make informed decisions.